The Far, Far Side of the Sky
by Seishuku Skuld
Summary: Frederick focus, his dreams before he came the prototype Gear. A small vignette on the aspirations of his childhood and how he came to join the Gear Project.


**The Far, Far Side of the Sky **  
By Seishuku Skuld (skuldhotohoriyahoo.com)

  
Series: Guilty Gear  
Pairing: none  
Warnings: spoilers for GGXX.

Notes: originally written for the SolxKy mailing list's Contre La Montre challenge. Not yaoi or shounen-ai in any way, but an interesting, alternative view of Frederick.

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It's a cool night, a night with a faint breeze hovering right at the cusp of the chill of spring and the warmth of summer. It's in that two week period near the middle of May where Boston can never quite decide it whether or not it wants to be summer, and so clings to spring as long as it possibly can.

He's out stargazing from the Blackard Institute's roof, though the street lights only twelve floors below him are lit, and half the building's lights come pouring through the windows. There's not much to see tonight, and there never is, in a crowded metropolitan city but he looks for what he can find and for now, that is satisfactory.

He names the brightest stars and their constellations, rattled off from a list he committed to his memory as a child. Canopus, Vega, Capella, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Altai, Aldebaran, Antares, Deneb…and even though some of them have not yet risen in the sky, and some of them are hidden by the lights on the horizon, he knows where they are, and how to find them.

It is three o'clock sharp in the morning, as he lifts a cigarette to his lips, lighting it with a match he pulls out of the pocket of his lab coat. He speaks quietly, anything to break the oppressive silence of the city at this early hour of morning. What automobiles he remembers from his youth not so long ago are now gone, cleansed from the planet in the environmentally-friendly name of magic.

"Good intentions," he mutters, "but so very wrong."

Something is empty.

"There is no clutter here." So quiet. So bright he can't see the stars at night. And what of it? He has lived in this large city for close to ten years of his life, but there is still a yearning for the lonely spaces of his childhood.

He recalls the silent hills his home, his town so small it contains but a few streets and even fewer lights. The nights were always clear in May, and with only the sound of the crickets after sundown he was free to turn his head upwards and imagine the places he dreamed of: strange worlds far away, planets with purple skies, alien flowers springing up at his feet and turning their smiling faces his way as he walked past.

"I want to be there," he would often find himself writing in his journal, a small, ratty Composition Notebook he had dug out of his father's notes from college. There were full equations he did not yet understand, complex numerical data about angles, luminosity, and periods of orbit. He wrote down everything he could, every story that came to mind, everything exotic his imagination could think up, and before he had moved out of his quaint upstate town, he had already filled out four books full of dreams.

So where, where had he gone astray? Had not his seat in the skies seemed so close only a few years ago? So close until magic…

Until magic, an endless source of energy tapped from the very fabric of the universe itself had been extracted, and all of science as he had known it had virtually vanished in the space of one year. He had turned away reluctantly, and now…

Now he stands on the roof of the Blackard Institute, his cigarette leaning downwards in his lips, sporting a large cylinder of ash at its end. He takes it from his mouth and throws it onto the ground, extinguishing its fire with his foot.

Did he not do what he could do?

He reaches inside his pocket, and instead of finding his pack of cigarettes he finds a small folded piece of paper, water-stained and crackly, yellowed with age, and brown from being carried around for six years. Six long years of late nights, early mornings, and thousands of cups of coffee. He unfolds it, reading the uncertain writing of an uncertain boy at an uncertain age, where nothing had seemed impossible and dreams had seemed to be so much more than they actually were.

_23 April 2004_

_I feel so small when I stand beneath the sky. It is so vast stretching the entire length of the horizon, and possessing a depth I understand but cannot fully comprehend. I want my chance up there, I want my dreams, my realities, my television shows and my storybooks to come true. _

_ I want mine. _

_It's for me to grasp, and I feel it there somewhere deep inside. _

_The dream of the Martian terrain will not be the stuff of romance. _

_24 April 2004___

_It is cloudy tonight, but I have memorized the rising and the falling of the constellations. I can gaze into a particular part of the sky and envision the clouds parting for me and my telescope. Maybe I will get some good pictures tomorrow night. _

_25 April 2004___

_I can't sleep, so I'm writing outside. I had another good dream last night… _

The writing ends at the very right edge of the page, on the very last line, its back blank. He liked to write one-sided.

There is nothing particularly special about this entry, for it is only one of thousands expressing the same sentiment. But it is the only one left to him, for the rest of the pages are now ash, burned to dust in a fitful rage six years ago.

And when he had given up his dreams by taking on this project, there was one thing he did not want to forget, and that was written on this piece of paper. He may never feel the crunch of Martian soil beneath his foot, he may never have to worry about inertial dampers, deflector shields, or even if there was enough breathable atmosphere. But still, still he would be there and in the end, that was what he had decided to cling too.

He would be the best. The first. The greatest mind, the most brilliant star in the sky, and everyone would remember him for what he had done, for what he had spent these past six years crying, sweating, and bleeding for. There was no progress without hard work, and he had worked hard to get himself here. It had started out as a mere seed, a germ of an idea, but it spread quickly throughout his mind, and bereft of his childhood fantasies he had snatched up the first thing that had seemed to him romantically impossible.

That was his ambition, and he had stepped up to the plate and faced it down. And at the end of the day he was the one still standing, clutching victory in his hands. What then does he have now, at the beginning of the day? In this time of limbo between night and morning, when all who were typically sane are asleep and only those with that special spark and burning heat inside them are still awake.

He heaves a sigh, folding the paper back up and stuffing it back into his pocket, where it will have to satisfy itself until he decides to take it out again. That may be tomorrow, months from now, or five minutes.

Maybe when the sun rises, maybe when it's almost time. Or maybe never again, because he will never feel the need to reassure himself by the time the sun sets this evening.

He suddenly feels that he needs to write, as much and as beautifully as he did in the past, though of late, since he burned his books, he has hardly committed any words to paper outside of memos and daily progress reports.

But when there's nothing to write upon, no pen, no bright light or hard surface for his work, he has recently realized that speaking, whispering the words that pour out of him do no harm. They get the words out, and when they are carried away by the wind to the far off corners of the horizon, they do not stay to be thrown into the fire by his own despairing hand.

"I have this need to sit in the stars," he murmurs to the magical hum of the lights and to the silent city which somehow seems to be listening intently. "But lately this seems to very far out of my reach.

"But I'm done. I'm finally finished. And everything checks out."

He smiles in the semi-darkness, lowering his head and kicking his foot around. His glasses slip just the tiniest bit and he pushes them back up with a finger, an instinctive gesture bred into him by his years as a child bent over his books.

"I've almost lost myself. To save the rest, I have shadowed my fire. I am not as bright as I used to be." He chuckles, "But I suppose that's what reality does to you. That's what growing up is all about, I guess." He heaves a sigh of regret, of childhood dreams shattered, of his world being tossed out the window, of being forced to accept a world he does not fully believe in.

"But I'm almost there," he says louder, and this time he can hear the lightest echoes of his voice coming from the rest of the buildings in this quiet part of the city, "I'm ready to go to where I've always wanted to be."

With the stars, with the brightest, the best, the most brilliant, the ones that will live forever that no one will forget.

"I've done it, and I want to be the first."

And if he didn't make it, if he missed…then he might die and never be able to ascend again.

Life's full of risks, and nothing inside forbade him from taking that.

He smiles as the very edge of the horizon turns a lighter shade of blue, lit by the flame of the rising sun.

A voice behind him coughs to get his attention, and he whirls around, his eyes wide and his heart pounding. He takes deep, quick breathes as he tries to calm his mind, the excitement bubbling up inside him. He cannot help the beginnings of a smile on his face.

His journey, his flight.

"Frederick," the man says firmly, dark hair streaked with white from many sleepless nights in the laboratory. "We want to get started now."

"About time," Frederick replies. "I've been waiting all night." All my life.

"We should be done by this evening," the old man sighs, tired, mirroring a quieter, softer version of his young mentee's anticipation.

"Good," Frederick says with a nod, striding purposefully towards the door that will lead him to the underground laboratory where he has conducted his research for the past six years.  
  
"Are you ready?" The man puts a hand on his shoulder.   
  
"Of course," Frederick responds, practically bounding down the stairs, ready to grasp the everlasting ambition that replaced his stars.

_End_


End file.
